Inspirations

Hello! This is my first blog for Write By Numbers. I have worked on various projects with the company since their first ever Cold Writing festival in Brixton Market in 2009. After last year’s run of Blueprint at the Bike Shed last year I came on board as Associate Artist which has been brilliant and there are lots of exciting things on the horizon!

My first blog post is my personal tribute to my favourite character Adrian Mole. I was deeply saddened to hear of Sue Townsend’s death last week as her writing has been something I’ve come back to throughout my life and really affected the way I viewed the world and shaped my humour.

I first read ‘The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾’ at the age of 8. I picked it up on one of my weekly trips to Hammocks. All book purchases were based on how snazzy I deemed the cover and this method of selection led to the discovery of literary gems! Post purchase my Mum would take a quick look and make sure I had picked up something decent. Sweet Valley High was scorned and a Point Horror ended up in the bin with ketchup on it. This may sound harsh but I quickly discovered the difference between trashy reading and contentious subject matter. . Adrian Mole and his yearnings for Pandora, were A-Okay! Just because the protagonist talked a lot about nipples, did not necessarily mean the book was trashy.

If only my Year 4 teacher at my uber conservative primary school agreed.

I had written (and illustrated) a review of ‘The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole’. After listening to other Year 4 classmates read aloud their reviews of The Famous Five and stories about girls doing ballet, I stood up and started my review with a direct quote about Adrian being interrupted by the postman whilst measuring his ‘thing’ in the privacy of his bedroom. The experience of surviving and dismissing the disapproving silence that followed has served me well. Like Adrian, I assumed they were all morons who didn’t get it.

Thanks to Adrian, I learned:

– What wanton means

– That Germaine Greer wrote an important book called The Female Eunuch. Sure I thought a Eunuch was a unicorn, but I was 8.

– You fail, everyone fails…and you carry on, Adrian always had one more ‘Waiting for the Giro’ or “The Tap” to pluck from his brain, however often his writing got rejected.

– There is a Norwegian leather industry

– Your parents are separate beings and will do what they want

– What the Falklands War was

– What the Giro was

– Popular public perception of Margaret Thatcher. “She has got eyes like a psychotic killer, but a voice like a gentle person. It is a bit confusing”

– What the Communist Party was

– Never to sniff glue

– That to be an intellectual is aspirational

– That when a teenager, it would be okay to want to wear rags and paint my room black

– That no matter how special you think you are there is always a Barry Kent who infuriatingly bulldozes over you.

Throughout marriages, divorces, demeaning jobs, bankruptcy, arson and a tussle with a troublesome group of endangered newts, he never stopped questioning the world or his place in it. He never stopped dreaming or imagining, no matter how many times he was left disappointed.

As well as Adrian Mole, Sue also wrote the first play I ever read, Bazaar and Rummage. She introduced me to what I love the most in books, theatre, movies : the greatness and profundity in people’s small personal stories.

A few weeks ago, when I was still bumbling through pages of research for Regeneration, I sent Charlie an email. It had one sentence in it:

“I have just realised WE ARE WRITING A STATE OF THE NATION PLAY.”

There weren’t any more words because, as soon as I wrote that sentence, I had to breathe into a paper bag for a little bit.

(NB: I’ve googled to try and find a good concise definition of ‘state of the nation play’ but it seems everyone expects you to understand the term implicitly. There are longer explorations, should you wish to tread there, here and here.)

It probably shouldn’t have come as as much of a shock as it did. Unlike the other plays I’ve created text for for WBN this one didn’t come out of an initial character idea. It came out of a subject.

Or rather, at first it came out of a process.

Since we saw Architecting in the Barbican Pit back in 2010, Charlie and I have wanted to make a play like the TEAM make a play. We wanted to do a huge research process and have multiple writers and an epic scope and history and literature and music and now, now, now. Only, where the TEAM make theatre about the USA, we wanted it to be about England.

The desire to do this is something we’ve come back to, with varying degrees of scale. We considered writers we’d like in the room, how to get a balance of styles, how we might structure a very long research process, how we might collectively decide what the subject was going to be. Then, a couple of years ago, an AD invited us to pitch some ideas to him for work we’d like to develop and (along with the play which would eventually become Blueprint, about which you’ll be hearing more than you ever probably wanted to in the coming months) we pitched the idea of us undertaking this R&D process. We didn’t provide a subject matter for it – just that we wanted to do this process. As is the way, nothing came out of that initial meeting – other than a stay in touch, but it got us thinking about maybe, actually doing this thing. The same AD invited us to submit a proper proposal to him six months or so later, and another London theatre was doing an open call out for proposals at the time, so we did some further thinking and this further thinking led us to conclude that we’d probably better propose a subject matter. And, undoubtedly influenced by our own experiences working in Brixton and Walthamstow, simultaneously Charlie and I came up with: regeneration. Then we got excited because, for the first time, it felt we had a subject matter to match our process.

Then, we pitched and got a polite no thank you. Which actually turned out to be a Good Thing, because we ended up making Beneath the Albion Sky instead and thus all is history. It also convinced us that no one was going to buy into the process, because there was – and we’d been honest about this – the possibility it might end in total utter failure. So, as is the way with WBN, we thought about how we might make it come about ourselves. And, as Charlie and I were so enthused by writing about regeneration (and we didn’t know if other writers we knew would be to the extent that we were) we thought we’d go ahead and co-write it. And, if we weren’t going to go all out on the writing process, then we were on the play itself. And, off of the back of Albion, we got a chance to do a paid scratch of 15 minutes of text at Salisbury Arts Centre last November. From which we all concluded: yes, we did have a play here.

Now, with Rich Mix providing development support, we’re probably a third of the way through the first proper stage of development for Regeneration. And, there is probably no way to describe the text currently other than: big. It’s got three major plot strands which, between them, run from 1903 to 2015. We see London grow from 1980 to the present day, but we also visit Berlin and New York and Newfoundland and, crucially, Yorkshire. People fall in (and out) of love, there are riots, a birth, a house which moves across place and time. There’s even some Spike Lee and Boris Johnson in there. There’s quite a lot of Lego too.

There are also times where the play gets proper, full-on angry. It’s the first time I’ve made a play which, even momentarily, does this (though admitedly I doubt anyone could see Reasons for Listing and come out being unclear as to my position on the importance of libraries). Somehow, the scope of Regeneration seems to have opened up the space for us to do this and it feels okay for us to include some of our anger. It’s also got space for us to be playful and funny and bemused and tell stories and make myths. But it’s maybe the fact that it can hold all of this – including the anger – that makes it the scarily official sounding ‘state of the nation’ (even when its form might suggest it is anything but).

I guess this blog post is therefore a dollop of writerly confession as we attempt to get the play up on its feet in the coming weeks. In Regeneration we’re making something that scares me. And that’s exciting.

This particular one is the St Michael’s ley line. It’s an imaginary dot-to-dot across southern Britain, connecting various pre-historic and medieval monuments,.

Ley lines were first proposed in 1921 as an archaeological theory. Albert Watkins suggested that in an earlier age, when this country was covered in forest, there were a few straight tracks that crossed the island from coast to coast. Important sites of pilgrimage were therefore built close to the tracks. His idea did not catch on with other archaeologists. They pointed out that, given the large number of historical landmarks littering the map of Britain, almost any straight line you draw across it is bound to hit a few.

Nevertheless, since the 60s a New Age mythology has been built up around the lines. Writers have claimed ley lines are natural sources of ‘vital energy’, that they having healing properties, that they are somehow linked with feng shui, ancient astronomy, or the Nazca lines of the ancient Peruvians.

Here’s an article on ley lines as part of an ‘earth matrix’. There’s a lot of information in that article and I wouldn’t beat yourself up if some of it didn’t make sense to you. But while we might all enjoy a smug laugh at the mystics, I can’t deny that there’s something seductive about looking at a map and seeing, buried underneath the motorways and rivers and other lines carving up our island, evidence of an ancient order totally different to our own.

Well, recently I found something that gives me that feeling. This is the Atlas of true names. It shows the original names of towns and cities, translated from old English, Gaelic and Danish. These names evoke images of what familiar places may have looked like a thousand or so years ago- when Hampshire was an ‘enclosed settlement’, and Scotland the ‘land of darkness’.

Take a good look at this map, and you start to picture a densely wooded island filled with separate peoples living in fortress communities named after their leaders- the Red One, the Short one, the Hasty one- it might help you to translate those town names if you bear in mind that in Old English ‘ing’ meant something like ‘the people of’. Also, good to know there was a whole town of people living ‘on the edge’. So they weren’t so different from us alter all.

And there’s so many mysteries in those names. How much more tattooed were our ancestors than their neighbours? Just what went on at the sinister-sounding ‘Important Place on the Remote Farms’? At what point did London change from being unfordable to unaffordable?

It’s refreshing to look at this island of concrete and gardens and see a wilderness. It is a world that has now been entirely abolished, and even in the remotest corners of Britain you can only catch a glimpse of what that world might have been like. But it’s good to remind yourself how recently, in fact, this land was cleared and tarmacked over. On the scale of human history, it was not so long ago that we moved from farms and fortresses to subways and skyscrapers. We’re still using the names of Saxon chieftains to guide us from one service station to the next. There is a long and rich history to this island, and you’re living in a particularly strange and tumultuous part of it.

Despite the fact that things in WBN Towers are frightfully busy I have been trying to see as much theatre as possible.

As such, I have been fortunate enough to see three shows recently from three companies that I have always wanted to see and have always respected (until now, from afar). It has been a while since I saw each show but they have stuck with me in different ways.

First up was Unlimited Theatre’s show MONEY the game show (which I saw at the Bush). I have always wanted to see a piece by Unlimited (especially because Corinne is always going on about a show she saw of their’s in Leeds). This one did not disappoint. I think the main thing that has stuck with me is how satisfying it can be to see Money on stage… and on this occasion I actually mean in production values and literally. Firstly, the set made me feel like I genuinely was an audience member of a dodgy game show on Channel 5 (sorry C5). This really added to the fun and games that we as an audience took part in. This made the story (and our implication in the end) all the more satisfying and thought provoking. Money well spent methinks. The thing that trumped the production values however was the ACTUAL MONEY on stage. Ten thousand shiny pound coins, stacked on stage. Thrown around as if they were worthless, almost as if a pound coin only has value because we believe it has…
I do wonder if this will be the last show I ever see where a bouncer is required for insurance reasons as well. Nothing like a heavy in the room to add to the gravitas of the situation. The stats and figures the show gave towards the end might also be one of the most haunting things I have seen in a theatre… that’s numbers for you.

The second show I want to talk about is Fevered Sleeps‘ Above Me The Wide Blue Sky. I recently had the good fortune of doing a workshop with Kaite O’Reilly on Alternative Dramaturgies (she has a splendid blog if you aren’t aware of it) and one of the many things I found interesting from the workshop was how she spoke about work: the rhythm of it, the repetitions, the movement, the sound – far more in terms of qualities of music than maybe I would myself. It was in this mindset that I really engaged with Above Me The Wide Blue Sky. Like how my mind might wander at a concert, my mind wandered during this show. I found myself reflecting on its themes, looking for the repetitions, trying to find patterns and rhythms. My mind would drift and suddenly snap back at an image envoked by the performer that clearly struck something in my brain.
I think when we go to the theatre (especially in the 21st Century with the way TV has wired us up) we have expectations to be engaged, constantly stimulated and that we are going to be ‘active’ throughout a whole show as it take us on a (narrative) journey. It was refreshing to see a show that did not do this, but instead worked in the same way a classical concert might. It allowed the mind to wander – and that was okay, not some fatal flaw in its dramaturgy. The ‘feel’ of this show has stuck with me far more than anything else – a feel of calmness but also loss. A lament for nature. This show has affected me more as if it were a song, which I find myself humming every so often.

The final production I find myself writing about is dreamthinkspeak’sIn the Beginning Was The End. I do love a bit of promenade site specific. Wandering around a building and delving underground – in a space I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. That was satisfying in its self. But this show really provided some powerful images, and the level of detail achieved for such a big project was really impressive. The main image that stuck with me was all the Customer Service workers shedding their clothes, and looking down from atop a spiral staircase at the audience looking up. This worked on so many levels for me. Firstly, there was the cycle of the workers leaving work, shedding their clothes and always going back – always going back to work. That repetition that necessity wouldn’t let them escape. But then there was the audience reactions themselves and how they fed in to it. After all, was had naked people. In front of us. Thus student girls were laughing and pointing at male bits, student guys were either being blokey or looking embarrassed. And that was just the student crowd. You had every audience reaction you could expect and, whilst the audience were looking up at them, gathered around a spiral staircase, the naked performers are looking down. Aware of this reaction and looking all the more sad for it. And then they go back to work, repeat the same process and wait for the next set of wandering audience to react in the same predictable manner. I watched this happen a couple of times.
I reckon I’m going to struggle to find another image this year quite so powerful and though provoking, without a single word being uttered.

Did you know I have a ‘thing’ about water? Not a ‘thing’ thing, just a writer’s thing. I blame early indocrination on Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and T S Eliot – and, oh, I could go on. Thus far in my writing life I have made characters fall into the river Cherwell, mythologise a trip to a Scottish loch, dance in a fountain, skinny dip in a lake as 1999 passed into 2000 and decide the future of their thirty odd year relationship by a duck pond. Indeed in a first draft read through of that particular play the most universally loved aspect of the play was the ducks and I understood why. I could list the one hundred and one metaphorical/ literary/ allusive reasons I come back to water time and time again, just like I could try and list the reasons why I could never live somewhere that wasn’t (at the very least) near a river. And why I have to make periodic trips to see the sea or else I might combust. But I’m sure you’re smart enough to guess them – or, better still, invent your own more complex ones.

The water thing, then, was part of the reason that I immediately loved the idea of Hannah Nicklin‘s The smell of rain reminds me of you. The idea is that you submit your (true) stories of kissing someone in the rain. As it happens, in the depths of my ‘Unblogged’ file I had one such story I’d already written up (but then, as the title of the file it resides in suggests, had never published because of things like scruples and privacy and the fact that the blog post concerned goes on to talk about my watching the son of someone famous take drugs in the lobby of a hotel. Ah, those were the days). So I found said blog, cut and pasted the relevant bit as – crikey – four years later I know I’ve shared much worse.

So now it resides as part of the growing collection of The smell of rain reminds me of you. Th0ugh, no, I’m not saying which is mine (though, if you know the lyrics of Gary Lightbody then it shouldn’t be too difficult). And if you’ve got a story and feel even vaguely writery then you should add yours too to what is fast becoming a beautiful, funny and often moving project.

[As a side issue should anyone feel like taking in other weather conditions I have a cool snow story too].

I saw One Hundred Days To Make Me A Better Person on Facebook from someone I went to University with (the first time round at the Uni where we argued about Beowulf and Dickens rather than the second time round at the Uni where we argued about Pinter and gratutious use of rope climbing in plays for children). And as soon as I saw the project I knew that I rather loved it.

Josie Long’s idea’s simple enough. Pick one thing. You then do that thing for one hundred days, hopefully documenting it along the way for us all to share in. Then after one hundred days glory will be yours and, hopefully, you may be a tiny bit better as a human being. Or, at the very least, you’ll have done something which made you/ a friend/ a stranger/ your dog smile.

And, drum roll, my pledge is:

‘Once a day for one hundred days I will write a postcard (and, where appropriate, send it to the person concerned)’.

I’m going to write properly about why I chose this over on Distant Aggravation though I shall undoubtedly pop over here to bask in triumph/ never mention it again when I fall flat on my face on day 37.

But – 100 days? That’s a lot of postcards. And let me not think of the stamps.